First they came for the Alt-Right . . .

The greatest Christmas movie in American history is Die Hard. In one of the most memorable scenes, John McClane watches with frustration as Officer Al Powell is misled into thinking there is no problem at an office building, where there has actually been a deadly hostage-taking. Before the complacent officer can drive away, our hero throws a corpse from a window onto the policeman’s car, then opens fire with an automatic weapon. As Officer Powell drives away screaming into his radio for backup, John McClane, his objective of attracting police attention achieved, cries triumphantly, “Welcome to the party, pal!”

White advocates may feel the same way about the current situation facing the National Rifle Association. Since the election of President Donald Trump, journalists, tech companies, and financial institutions have deplatformed white advocates on the pretext that they are “fighting hate.” There is a campaign to try to strip nonprofit status from dissident organizations such as New Century Foundation and VDARE Foundation. Internet companies are stopping racially aware whites from sharing their message through restrictive policies that are motivated by ideology. Reporters are leading pressure campaigns against advertisers in what is thinly disguised as “journalism.”

President Trump, and conservatives generally, have rewarded corporate America with a tax cut but remain largely silent about efforts to muzzle the people who were an important part of the GOP’s winning 2016 coalition. Indeed, conservative movement functionaries may be quietly grateful their Identitarian rivals are being deplatformed. The history of the conservative movement is largely one of “purges,” particularly of those who come too close to expressing awareness of racial realities. The conservative movement must remain “respectable,” after all.

The Alt-Right has long been identified by Beltway conservatives as the most important target to be silenced. Much of their initial opposition to Donald Trump was driven by their belief he would energize what Ben Domenech called “hollow, Euro-style identity politics” in National Review’s “Against Trump” symposium. One of the other contributors to that compilation was Dana Loesch, who is now a spokesperson for the National Rifle Association. Mrs. Loesch may have recently muted her opposition to now-President Trump, but still denounces “identity politics.” In August 2017, she proclaimed on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, that the “Alt-Right is antithetical to conservatism.” This was perhaps motivated by the incredible accusation by a writer in the Huffington Post the month before that The Blaze itself was an “alt-right outlet,” with Mrs. Loesch responsible for pushing a “civil war.”

Whatever her denunciations of “identity politics,” Mrs. Loesch is now the target of a coordinated media offensive as she has becoming the most prominent voice in defense of gun rights following the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. She’s also being specifically targeted by David Hogg, the Parkland shooting survivor who has been appointed an unchallengeable spokesman for gun control by the mainstream media. Mrs. Loesch is also on the receiving end of wild ad hominem attacks which should be familiar to white advocates. For example, Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, said she “loves watching Americans die.” One is reminded of white advocates accused of being driven purely by “hate” of other people “for no other reason than the color of their skin.”

The campaign is especially remarkable because of how some schoolmates of the victims are clearly being treated as more equal than others. Kyle Kashuv, a student at Parkland who survived the shooting, has called for Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel to resign. The father of one of the students who was actually killed in the attack also referred to the deputy who did not enter the school during the shooting as a “coward.” However, David Hogg condemned Republicans who made similar criticisms. Amazingly, he didn’t even criticize Sheriff Israel or the deputies whose job it was to protect the students, instead suggesting responsibility should be pinned on Republican Governor Rick Scott. Again, white advocates may be reminded of how the media forces a narrative, such as demanding a national conversation about police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, or Baltimore, Maryland, even when the specific facts contradict the claims of most journalists. The NRA is even accused of being a “terrorist group” by some leftists, notably the excitable black columnist Michael Harriot. These wild accusations should also be familiar.